Out-of-Town Transfers – A Brief Explanation of Trip Durations

Global Alliance is glad to fulfill our clients’ transportation requirements, wherever their plans may take them. This often means that our chauffeurs make out of town trips, transferring clients to locations on the outskirts of the Greater Toronto Area and beyond. Whether you have business in Hamilton, a social function in Oshawa, or a conference in Blue Mountain or Niagara Falls, Global Alliance is glad to accommodate you with a chauffeured ride to your out-of-town destination.

It is important to keep in mind how trip durations are calculated for billing purposes on such longer transfers outside the city as well as in its suburban municipalities. Global Alliance does not utilize a flat rate per say, although a fairly accurate rate is available for price estimates if requested. This rate is based on the out-of-town hourly rate for the vehicle in question applied to the estimated total trip duration for our driver.

Our method for calculating this duration is commonly referred to in the limousine indutry as “garage-to-garage time”. Don’t be surprised if you hear your reservations or dispatch agent employ this term, although they often try not to use the jargon term without explanation. Essentially, garage-to-garage refers to the total trip time as calculated from Global Alliance’s facility in Etobicoke (west end of Toronto, not far from Pearson Airport) to the pick-up and drop-off locations and then back to our facility. This calculation applies to the reservation’s rate whether the chauffeur returns to garage or not, or even if they return to our expected main service area in Toronto or not.

Utilizing this block of time ensures that our chauffeur’s driving time is fully compensated, not merely for their time to or from a further-afield destination with a client in car but also the time to or from a destination to make the pick-up or return to the next expected service area after completing the service. Since the next expected service area can vary greatly depending on the next assignment for that chauffeur, setting our home base as a fixed point of calculation allows us to offer a consistent and predictable trip duration total so that our price estimates to our clients can be as accurate as possible.

Employing a trip duration calculation system such as that described here allows us to fairly compensate our experienced chauffeurs for their work as well as provide our clients with a stable and easily-intelligible framework for pricing multi-hour out-of-town trips. If you have any further questions about this system, please ask our knowledgeable reservationists when booking.